“Our investment in AI continues. But we remain fully committed to the ideas of meta-universes. We’ve been working on these two core areas for years in parallel, and in many ways the two areas overlap and complement each other,” said Mark Zuckerberg.
Developing meta-universes hasn’t made the social media giant profitable – the company continues to lose billions of dollars. Meta Facebook Reality Labs (FRL), Facebook’s meta-universe division, lost $13.7 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion in 2022. In 2021, the loss was $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion.
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“Reality Labs has a lot of components including VR, AR, meta-universes, social platforms and neural interfaces, and we do have a long term perspective. I can’t guarantee you I’ll be right.. But I do think that’s the direction the world is going,” says the Meta chief.
In its latest reports, Meta reported net income of $7.79 billion in the second quarter of its fiscal year, up from $6.7 billion in the previous year.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s new platform has already found itself at the center of a scandal. The creators of several cryptocurrency accounts on Twitter have reported their clones on microblogging platform Thread. Crypto-enthusiasts on Twitter have warned: clone creators look like scammers.
In April, Meta announced that Instagram and Facebook users would no longer be able to create posts with digital collectibles.